


The Dance Studio

by notenoughtogivebread



Series: 250 Glee Fic Prompts [5]
Category: Glee
Genre: Ballet, Childhood, Gen, Racism, anti-Semitism, dance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-15 06:29:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4596417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notenoughtogivebread/pseuds/notenoughtogivebread
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for 250 Glee Prompts: 86. Jake spent a lot of time at the Madame's ballet studio as a young boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dance Studio

Jake stood at the barre, stretching and watching the older girls dancing in the advanced class. Madame let him come in sometimes as long as he was quiet. He heard her tell his mom just last week that she was “waiting on a growth spurt.” He thinks that means that when he gets just a little bigger he’ll be able to work with these girls on lifts. For now, he partners with little Cierra, who likes to look like a princess, but doesn’t really love the work involved with ballet. She’ll do, he guesses, for a while.

But tiny as Cierra is, that older girl Rachel isn’t much bigger than her. Jake yearns to dance with her. He likes the fire in her eyes, likes how she takes all of this so seriously. Mostly he likes that she takes her place in the center of the room, commands attention even in a room full of tall willowy blonde girls.

Like birch trees in autumn, his mom called them. Mom was a bit of a poet. Sometimes at night while he pretended to do his homework she would read aloud the ad copy for some house she was trying to sell. They were good, sometimes a little silly, but they worked. Or so she said. He wondered what words she would use to describe Rachel, so small, her big dark eyes standing out in her face with her dark hair pulled up into a bun. She didn’t look much like a tree. Maybe she could be some woodland animal. Deer had big eyes like that, right? He could picture a small brown deer passing through the trees, its ears all at attention. He guessed a person passing by would be excited about seeing the deer more than the trees, pretty as they may be. Hey, maybe he was a poet too. 

The big girls crossed to the barre, crowding him away, so Jake slipped out and down the stairs, listening to the piano and Madame’s stick beating out the rhythm while the girls went through their forms. The “tumbling room” at the foot of the stairs was empty, and if he kept the door open he could hear. There was no barre, but there was a mirror, so he tried to follow along, for a while anyway.

The mats tempted him, and his ballet sort of morphed into more tumbling runs, rolls and one-handed cartwheels. He’d been working for weeks on doing a cartwheel with no hands at all. It was fun, different from his grand jetés, but flying all the same.

He tumbled to the ground, then pressed through on his hands while holding his legs wide. He wished he could push right through to a handstand. He’d be really strong if he could do that. He checked his form in the mirror along the wall. His legs were good, but…he fixed the point of his toes. There. His arms were shaking now, so he had to drop down and stretch them out.

A door slammed upstairs and he couldn’t hear the piano anymore. It was more like he could feel the bass, and he got up and gave himself up to it, the drumming like his own pulse.

Now his dance was his own thing, a mix of the ballet Madame was so strict about and some of the moves he’d seen at the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company last spring.

That had been exciting. Madame had brought the kids on a field trip, and he got to go because his mom signed up as a chaperone, and so Madame said he could come along. He remembered two things from that day: he remembered that he had ended up standing up to watch the performance, amazed at the things these dancers could do. And he remembered that the dancers looked like him: brown and black bodies flying through the air or stepping on stage like they were rooted in the earth.

He was trying to remember how, holding a wide stance, bringing each foot down slowly, deliberately, trying to imagine himself more a tree less a bird when he heard voices in the hallway. Class was almost over then. The very oldest girls–the teenagers–were coming in. Where was his mom? He hated to be around those girls. He wasn’t sure why, except that their pretty outsides didn’t always match their insides.

Like, that Ashling had her own words for Rachel, words that were ugly and seemed to be all about her being Jewish. Jake couldn’t imagine what being Jewish had to do with dancing. He’d have to ask his mom. Because no one ever said anything about HIM dancing “like a Jewish princess”…though he guessed that would be like a Jewish prince, but he didn’t think King David ever did ballet.

He hung in the doorway, making himself small, but Ashling and the other teenage girls saw him anyway. “Oh, look, it’s the little brown church mouse, hanging around again. Didn’t your mom teach you it’s wrong to stare?”

“I’m not staring. I’m waiting for my mom,” he said, as bravely as he could.

“Leave him alone, Ash. He’s just a little kid.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t like the way he _looks_ at me.”

He felt it bubbling up inside him, rumbling in his belly like thunder. Before he knew it, he was standing solidly in the hallway, looking up, up, into her big blue eyes, fists clenched. “I don’t _want_ to look at you. Your turnout is sloppy. I heard Madame say.”

Ashling seemed to grow even taller, and she reached for him, but the other girls laughed and pulled her away. “Ooh, looks like the little guy’s got _your_ number!”

It was probably a good thing that Mama came rushing through the door then, because he wasn’t sure WHAT would have happened next. He just knew dance might be a little scary for a while. But he also knew that even a whole herd of Ashlings wouldn’t keep him away.


End file.
